Bush Celebrates 4 nightmarish years of NCLB

[Moses]

Today's Presidential Action:

On The Four-Year Anniversary Of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush Traveled To North Glen Elementary In Glen Burnie, Maryland, To Discuss Efforts To Strengthen Education. President Bush discussed the Administration's commitment to strengthening America's education system, the progress made under NCLB, and the work that remains to be done.

*The Success Of North Glen Elementary Shows We Can Raise Expectations, Measure Progress, And Get Results. Students at North Glen have made great progress in reading and math, and results for African-American students show the achievement gap is closing. In 2003, 57 percent of North Glen students were proficient in reading, and 46 percent were proficient in math. By 2005, 82 percent of students were proficient in reading, and 84 percent were proficient in math. Among African-American students, the percentage of students who were rated proficient in reading rose from 45 percent in 2003 to 84 percent in 2005; in math, 35 percent were rated proficient in 2003, and 82 percent were rated proficient in 2005.

With Passage Of NCLB, The Nation Made A New Commitment To Reforming Education. America is challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations; ending the shuffling of children through the system; and building an education system that prepares children for the demands of the global economy. The Administration is raising expectations and increasing accountability; giving local authorities more flexibility with Federal funds; requiring curricula based on proven methods of successful teaching; and giving parents options when schools fail.

*The President Has Made Education Funding A Priority. Since 2001, the Administration has increased spending on elementary and secondary education by 41 percent. Title I funding for disadvantaged students is up 45 percent, and funding for the Reading First program has quadrupled.

NCLB Is Raising Standards And Ensuring That The Educational Progress Of More Children Than Ever Before Is Measured. The role of the Federal government is to insist on standards, provide resources, hold people accountable, and help school districts to meet standards. Under NCLB, schools that take Federal education money must show whether or not children are learning and whether or not expectations are being met. Because states are testing and measuring, we know NCLB is producing results as test scores go up and the achievement gap narrows.

*States Have Adopted Accountability Plans. Under NCLB, states are required to design accountability plans and test students every year, from third to eighth grade. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have designed and adopted accountability plans to test students and measure progress.

* Standards And Accountability Are Working. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the achievement of young students has risen since 2002. In 2005, America's fourth graders posted the best reading and math scores in the test's history. Eighth graders earned the highest math scores recorded by NAEP.

*The Achievement Gap Is Closing. Minority students are also making progress at a faster rate, so the achievement gap is narrowing. According to NAEP, African-American and Hispanic fourth graders set records in both reading and math scores. Eighth grade Hispanic and African-American students achieved the highest math scores ever.

Despite NCLB's Successes, There Is More Work To Be Done. No Child Left Behind is working, but we must continue to hold schools accountable. The Nation needs to improve its high schools and test students in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades. The President has proposed initiatives to improve education by, for example, having more math and science professionals serve as adjunct high school teachers and training more teachers for Advanced Placement courses. With these reforms, the quality of secondary education will improve and ensure that every student graduates from high school prepared to enter college or the workforce with the skills needed to succeed.

— The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
2006-01-09
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060109-3.html
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[Moses]

Dear readers reacting to the Bush campaign for believers in a marketing tactic created to recruit strength for an increasingly ill-fated war on our public schools:

I think that the ommissions of context in this story are, perhaps the most important pieces of information missing and that the report suffers from a faulty leap of faith that assumes everyone buys into the "testing as proof of learning" school of fabricated promise brought to you by the NCLB act. I also take issue with the characterization that the test scores of the minority students, relative to the white students, illustrates the profound effects of NCLB to lessen the margin of performance among races in our schools.

First, let me try to explain the particular and unique atmosphere of this location (Glen Burnie) in our county...this is a difficult task because it is extremely regional. It is a situation similar to simply saying Queens or the Bronx (or any smaller neighborhood) to a New Yorker...It is the kind of regional town that grew out of it's proximity to the city that it sprang from, Baltimore. In particular, it grew outside of an industrial part of Baltimore and developed a strong populus of working class, low-income, blue-collar and historically non-academically oriented folks. It is an area historically characterized by the regional "Welcome to Balmur, Hon" phrase. It has a reputation for diners and used car lots and hock shops and girlie bars. It developed into a congested eyesore of commercial blight that stretches several miles and is surrounded by neighborhoods of the lowest-priced real estate in our county. There are street after street of tiny& nbsp;cookie-cutter homes, many in deteriorated shape, and acres of run-down apartments. This is the kind of place where yards are full of junked cars and motorcycles, where reports of organized pitbull dog fights are made by law enforcement, where street crimes and drug trade and tatoo parlors proliferate along side of generations of stable but economically marginal families living, several generations in one tiny home, bought on the shoe-string salary of of one now retired steel company or other similar factory worker's salary years ago and now supported by his pension. It is a place with a high incidence of lung cancer and unemployment and alcoholism. It is a place that people can get stuck in and have a high probablilty of rarely moving beyond.

Regionally, this area is all built up on it's association and proximity to water. The harbors and shipyards and water-related industries grew generations of workers associated with the factories and industries of the Chesapeake bay. There are oil refineries, chemical factories, ship building plants, acres of old and deteriorating eye-sores of ugly buildings spewing smoke, and until recently, spewing waste into the bay and surrounding waterways. The waterways are a highway for shipping. The air still smells rancid and the scenery is grey and depressing. It is surrounded by highways taking the speeding traveler over, around, and away from this deteriorating and dying area. It is the part of the trip where you close your windows from the stench and wonder how generations survive the assault on their senses and psyches.

In recent years, as afficionados of water access in our county finding lessening availability of water accessed real-estate, and as the price of waterfront and waterview real estate has soared in this region, people with an eye on the benfits of "buying low" and renovating or building have been shopping the run-down sections of Glen Burnie and turning cheap, deteriorated lots and homes into magificent and profitable real estate ventures. Certainly, these are not folks who would entertain the thought of putting their school-aged children, if they have them, into neighborhood public schools. There are plenty of private schools in and around Baltimore and the neighboring affluent communities closer to Annapolis to accomodate the affluent property investors who are cropping up in this and other depressed little pockets in and around the Baltimore and Annapolis waterfront.

So, how can I explain without sounding like I am over-generalizing about the neighborhood school being showcased for Bush's NCLB campaign...The fact is that the margin of discepancy between white and minority children in this school is rooted in the cultural and economic particulars of this region. It points to the overwhelming devastation of poverty, and social needs ignored, I think, rather than the slanted propoganda about progress. The fact that the margin of difference between the several ethnic groups, the several races of children is so low, points to a tradition of cultural and economic struggle rather than a condition or result of an act that encourages progress or proficiency at any sacrifice.

Is it surprising that povery and social and economic struggle does not have a race preference when it comes down to the effects of these factors on the reletave sucess of these children? Does it surprise you that black children living in a culturally, socially and economically compromised location in America do about as poorly as white children in a similar situation? It doesn't surprise me at all...

If you look at the graduation rates, the incidents of violence in the schools, the expulsion rates, the actual scores on the almighty standardized and so-called acheivement tests for the schools in this region, as compared with other parts of the county, you will see a decidedly different picture. But, that is not the story that this campaign wants to tell. Are the students making progress? Hopefully they experience some auxilary benefits from the attention to testing and proficiency demanded by the small-minded act. But, does the margin of the acheivement of the races tell us anything important about the effects of NCLB? This I doubt, because the race issue is so marginal in an area where poverty and other social and economic indicators shows so little preference for race.

Now back to the grades on these so-called proficiency and acheivement tests in this school. Let me help you feel the effects of your coffee and at the same time remind you of the drills and desperation happening in our schools these days. Abbreviated like this: the little kid in the back row whose stomach is growling, whose mother had little prenatal care while he was being formed, whose father regularly spends the welfare check on drugs, or the other little kid whose mother works three jobs to put food on the table and whose clothes or shoes or glasses barely cover her needs, whose attention span has been aligned to the television, whose teeth hurt; the kids whose family can't spend a lot of time worrying about the nutritional value of dietary choices; the others who are beaten more often than spoken to...each one of these hypothetical children had better d**n well bubble the correct answer on a given test or they are going to shame their entire class and their teacher and their school.

I taught pigeons to peck at circular buttons in college, certainly I believe that children, minimally, can be trained to do the same. Now, how are the test-scores accomplished? My answer is this: however way it takes; if it is by changing the answers, by holding and guiding the child's pencil , by giving the answers, by changing the curve, by retake and retake and retaking the test, by bribe, or by cheat, or by rote, ad nauseum. Don't you see? The tests ARE the educational program. And if you DON'T understand the route by which you take the children there, I suggest you drive your hybrid car over to ANY public elementary school in America today and get permission to observe a third grade class at work. Doesn't matter where or who or when you show up, they are ALL on the same page at any given time, in any given school. And if you believe for one precious moment that the propoganda about "specific outcomes" means that they are learning, lemme apologize for your obvious adversion to the details and specifics about the results of the NCLB on our classrooms these last devastating years...they are LEARNING to take TESTS. So, call that learning if you will and we will agree from this moment on to avoid each other in a debate about learning.

There was a similar story to this one last year in a little school in a run-down little town in Califormnia. Of all the highly attended and affluent schools in neighboring and more appealing regions and towns in California, this little school surpassed every one of them in their rate of proficiency on standardized tests. How did they do it? They got rid of recess and cut back on clubs and sports and anything that wasn't part of the drill campaign alligned with test outcomes alone. The teacher was interviwed in an on-line chat forum in the Post. What did he say about his conscience or his expertise in light of his so-called accomplishment? He said that he felt sad. He said that he knew that the kids were suffering. And, most importantly, he felt that their accomplishment proved nothing more than that these students could be pressured, even destroyed to some degree by a relentless determination to raise test scores. Did they LEARN? Did he feel PROUD as a teacher? He thought neither. He felt beat down. He felt that these students and he, himself, deserved something more along the lines of the teaching and learning that he had idealized and longed to practise until NCLB came along and painted away the colors of childhood and replaced them with the prison-grey colors of a testing factory.

Thats the REAL story behind the future of our schools, my eloquent friends. That's the REAL story as long as you continue to haggle about the statistics and theories and political affiliations of a destructive and dishonest campaign that is destroying the magic of childhood and repelling the teachers away from their once admirable and challanging ideals and changing them to oppressed soldiers in another badly orchestrated war. Thats the time being wasted and the years we are never going to recoup; the children will be left scarred and ill-prepared for anything that's promised them, the one's who suffer with the law, who ultimately will grow into adults who will look us all in the eye one day and wonder why we let THEM be the sacraficial lambs for all that might have been wrong, and that might have been fixed in our once great land.

And they will still be reported, accross our country, in newspapers which became filthy rich with the financial rewards of their associated educational enterprises, as being the highest acheivers, the most proficient, the opportunity-balanced, the equitably educated...and they will open their mouths and nothing but bubbles will emerge: "OOOOO, OOOOO, OOOOO...." (translation: I don't have anything to talk about since that wasn't covered on the test.)


---- Anne E. Levin Garrison